Bulusan and Taal update for 01/10/2011

Hello from snowy Minnesota! I’m here at Gustavus Adolphus College to give a talk for the Geology Department (special thanks to Dr. Elli Goeke for inviting me out!)

Thought I’d throw out a few updates while I have some down time before the talk:

Bulusan and Taal: PHIVOLCs has been reporting a slight uptick in earthquakes at Bulusan – increasing over the last few days to 6-8 seismic events per day. However, there is thick cloud cover at the summit region of the volcano, so no observations have been made about the state/extent of steam plume from the vents at the summit. However, even with this small change at Bulusan, the alert status remains at 1 with the permanent 4-km danger zone and flight restrictions still in place. I actually hadn’t noticed before, but PHIVOLCs has some nice lahar/lava flow and ash/pyroclastic flow hazard maps for the Bulusan region on their website – you can pretty clearly see all the towns that are in the path of potential lahars that can be generated during eruption or without any eruption by remobilizing ash deposits, especially from the recent explosions from late 2010.

Meanwhile, in the same report, PHIVOLCs reported 13 seismic events at restless Taal, showing that even with the reduced alert status at the caldera, there are still signs that the magmatic system is active under the volcano.

{As a sidenote, welcome back to Ralph and the Volcanism Blog after some time away. Good to have him back on the frontlines of volcano blogging!}

Top left: Bulusan in the Philippines.